The SINGLE Most Important Step to Protect Yourself from Government Spying

For the average person this doesn’t matter, but the battle over online privacy is a generational once. First, the infrastructure must continue to support at least optional privacy, groups like EFF are key to this. One tactic is to try to play the government against the corporations; while both are opposed to privacy they have different agendas and opposing interests.

Second, we’ve lost an entire generation to anti-privacy – call it the Facebook Generation. Once you lose a culture of privacy, once privacy itself is considered fringe, it might be difficult to ever get it back. This cultural battle is going to be perhaps even sort of fun in a prurient way, as the issue of photos of young women online, voluntarily or involuntarily, continues to cause controversy and backlash.

3 thoughts on “The SINGLE Most Important Step to Protect Yourself from Government Spying”

Well I never take the battery out of my phone because if the FBI wanted to wiretap me they would be bored out of their minds. The thought of them doing so amuses me. My contribution to the revolution is wasting FBI resources, I should get a medal.

“So in a sense you are already a suspect,” Prof. Lyon said. We all are, and most people seem enthusiastic about submitting themselves to these surveillance regimes, from personal updates online to customer loyalty programs.

“We’re going through a cultural change,” he said. “Big surveillance is still there, but we need to be aware of our own responses and our participation in surveillance.”

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It is in these cultural shadows that change first starts to take hold, but it takes major events to bring them to popular recognition. Prof. Lyon cites 9/11 as the era-defining event that changed attitudes toward surveillance, enabling the vast security expansion that followed, not just in the United States, but in Canada, where it remains visible in everything from airport security to hate speech laws.

“We’ve lost a sense of the past, the antecedents, what happened before,” Prof. Lyon said. “What I want to suggest is that the historical background is helpful for understanding what happened after 9/11. It was there in an embryonic form.

Another question I have, people are flocking to “DuckDuckGo” the supposedly private search engine that doesn’t track you like google does. How does anyone actually know they don’t track you? Because they said so? How did some unprovable claim by some no-name company all of a sudden get treated as gospel by so many people and press?